Strangeness
by bethos
Summary: T'pol reflects on her current situation with the Enterprise crew.


Title: Strangeness  
  
Author: Apocalypse  
  
Fandom: ENT  
  
Disclaimer: She's not mine, she's Bermaga's, and boy do they ever enjoy her.   
  
Rating: G  
  
Summary: T'pol reflects.  
  
Author's Note: Ha! No pairing at all. Because there *shouldn't* be a bloody pairing for this lady ... I blame all the stupid herein on the fact that the story was conceptualized and written after 2:30 AM on a Thursday.  
  
________________________________________  
  
At the beginning, she was alone.  
  
The temperature had been the first thing she'd noticed. The chill was uncomfortable. The building that had been her home in San Francisco had had a controlled climate specifically designed for its desert-born inhabitants, and although the temperature in her personal space had been altered to her own specifications, she could not remain in her quarters all the time.  
  
She stepped aboard the strange, cold, grey human ship and wondered how long she would have to stay. Her shipmates were strange creatures. Although intellectually and logically she knew that when her own race was as young as this one was now, they had actually been much worse off than these careless, idealistic, adventurous, rambunctious humans, somehow she found it difficult to grasp this and make it part of her awareness as she felt their eyes on her, heard the undertones in their voices, watched the changes in their body language as she approached, felt the chilly temperature of their ship and knew that the only familiar Vulcan contact she could have was through subspace, and even that was only the occasional personal letter from home and the orders she received from Soval - as if that was actually a friendly, familiar prospect.  
  
Vulcans have emotions. It is merely their philosophy to control and eschew them in the pursuit of logic.  
  
She had emotions.  
  
At the beginning, she was alone. And she was afraid.  
  
She felt their bigotry, understood it and even, in some ways, recognized it - as though humanity was a distorted mirror of her own kind - and tried to put it out of her mind. It was beyond difficult - it was next to impossible - hewing out a place for herself here in the solid stone of their distrust and prejudice, but she managed. The Enterprise was her home now, not just her station, and her crewmates were her colleagues, her comrades, and might someday grow to be more:  
  
Friends.  
  
Loyalty and friendship are emotional concepts, not logical ones based in rationality ... as is the concept of family ... but Surak's teachings chose, at the beginning, which emotions did not need to be eschewed.  
  
Vulcans can love, the ones who allow themselves to admit it. It takes a long time, and it's never based on such transient things as the physical - sexual attraction being a silly thing irrelevant to the plak tow in any case. But a meeting of minds, of spirits, is encouraged where it is found.  
  
A meeting of species has never yet happened and T'pol doubted that it ever would, not in such a deep, abiding way as love. But friendship ... that is possible, she thought, with time.  
  
With all of them.  
  
All of these young, silly, emotional, irrational humans: all of them brilliant in their own special ways, even as all of them were abysmally stupid and illogical. For reasons that she couldn't understand, she *liked* them. And some of them, she could even respect.  
  
Soval did not approve. He thought that they had infected her. But she didn't think that her infection was necessarily a bad thing. Surak had said, "To control our emotions, we must first understand them." He'd been young, then, before he was acknowledged to be the brilliant philosopher he turned out to be, but it was a quotation that resonated with her especially now. In order to understand her emotions, she had to admit that they were there.  
  
And these humans - these strange, bizarre creatures with whom she lived her daily life and with whom she had strangely come to identify despite how very odd and immature she found them to be - dealt with their emotions every day, admittedly some with less success than others. And their minds were all so fresh and vibrant and *different* than anything she had ever experienced before - some part of her wanted to let them all in, to take them all in, to learn everything there was to know about them, even as another part of her quaked and shivered in undeniable fear of the unknown.  
  
But she had abandoned the High Command. She had chosen to brave the unknown at Captain Archer's side, to do the best she could to aid this rambunctious young race as it quested into the threateningly unfamiliar ...   
  
And if she was going to do that, she thought that she had to understand the unknown that she lived with every day.  
  
So, like all adventurers since the beginning of time, T'pol decided to explore ... little by little, bit by bit, the stranger would continue to make herself one with her strange land, and maybe, someday, her human crew would count her as friend as well as as shipmate.   
  
This was not the end. But when the end finally came, T'pol knew that she would not be alone.  
  
She was glad. 


End file.
